Blizzard to take up to 15 percent of Diablo III real-money auction house sales

Blizzard is going to take a cut of all in-game items sales for Diablo III.

Since its initial announcement last summer, Blizzard's decision to let Diablo III players buy and sell in-game items for real money through a centrally controlled, in-game auction house has drawn controversy. Today's announcement of the specific fees and conditions for those auctions seems unlikely to calm those angry that Blizzard is trying to "cash in" on the game's second-hand digital goods market.

In the real-money auction house, Blizzard will charge a flat fee of $1 (or a rough local equivalent) for sales of unique equipment like armor, weapons, and accessories, or take a 15 percent cut for sales of common, "stackable" commodities like gems, materials, and gold. Even in the gold-based version of the auction house, which uses in-game currency exclusively, Blizzard will deduct a 15 percent fee from each item's sale price. That's a move that should help stem inflation as gold continues to be created throughout the in-game economy.

Sellers will be faced with an additional 15 percent fee if they want the purchase price to be transferred to a third-party service like PayPal. Blizzard also warns that "additional fees from PayPal may apply." The only way to avoid these transfer fees is by putting the sale proceeds into a Battle.net balance, which can be used to purchase digital editions of Blizzard games as well as certain in-game purchases in World of Warcraft.

This is a major change from the grey market for in-game goods that sprung up around Diablo II, which operated through third-party websites and chat rooms, cutting Blizzard out of the process entirely. Blizzard insists that consolidating the market within Diablo III, and eliminating cheating and item duplication through a required persistent Internet connection, will make the item sales process safer and more convenient. Taking direct control of the market will also help stem "numerous customer-service and game-experience issues" caused by Diablo II item sales through "unsecure third-party organizations," the company said.

Regional servers and technical details

In-game auctions in Diablo III will be listed for 48 hours before being returned to the initial seller (for no fee), and players will be limited to ten active auctions at a time in each auction house. The restriction, Blizzard said, should "ensure that players focus on listing high-quality items that have a good chance of being purchased."

While equipment can be sold in a standard auction or for a "Buy it Now"-style offering price, Blizzard has an interesting sales system set up for the more common commodities. All commodities of the same type will be thrown into a unified marketplace pool, where sellers will be able to easily purchase them at the current best-available price. Blizzard says this system should help eliminate the kind of "search spam" that occurs when digital markets are flooded with identical items at a wide range of prices.

International players will be split into three distinct servers for real-money auction purposes. The Americas server will cover the US, Canada, and Latin America, as well as Australia, New Zealand, and Southeast Asia (making the server name something of a misnomer, but never mind that). The Europe server will cover all European countries, plus Middle East and African nations. The Asia server covers South Korea, Taiwan, Macau and Hong Kong.

While players will be able to use a "Global Play" option to connect with friends on other servers, they will only be able to access the real-money auction house for their local country's server. Players on the Asian server are out of luck on this score; they won't have access to a real money auction house when the feature launches, Blizzard said.

In fact, all players are going to have to wait a bit longer than expected to access the real-money auction house. Blizzard now says it won't be available until a week after the game's May 15 launch. Those that purchase a digital version of the game after that launch will also have to wait three days to use the feature, "for security reasons."

Blizzard reconfirmed that it will not be offering items in the auction house directly—all sold items will be posted by players who earned them through standard gameplay. In addition, players on the game's maximum Hardcore difficulty will have access to an exclusive, gold-only auction house featuring only items from other Hardcore players.

Oh, and in case you were wondering, there's a maximum per-item sale price of $250 (or 100 billion in-game gold) at each auction house. So get ready to save up for a while if you want those rarest items.

Update: The original version of this article incorrectly stated that a Battle.net subscription could be used to pay for a World of Warcraft subscription, and was unclear on the process for getting sales proceed into a PayPal account. We regret the error.

I'm already convinced that I don't need to plop down $60 for D3. We're basically into the "do I need to bother surveying the bargain bin" category now. I realize that there are a *LOT* of people who are turbo excited for D3, but I'm not one of them.

I think it will be interesting to see how this works itself out. I played eve for a while back in the day and the intricacies of how ISK (the eve currency) could become real always fascinated me. It was primarily subscription cards back then, I don't know how much its changed now.

I hope they have ironed out all their formulas for drops and item rarity. That unique item won't be so unique if 5000 other people are trying to sell it too.

OT, i'm still on the fence about playing this. My love and loyalty to D1 and D2 are very strong. I like the cross platform play so its easy to multiplayer in my house. I guess my hesitation is how buggy and stable (from a connect to battlenet perspective) it will be at first launch.

As someone who has been unhappy but resigned to the idea of a RMAH... this is actually kinda cool. Well thought out to prevent gold farming.

It's got measures to prevent this being a real profit generator but it's perfectly suitable for the average player. No one's getting rich selling items (unless you have like eleventy million magic find, i guess), but I'd happily trade this awesome axe of awesome that my wizard's not going to use for Chipotle money.

I am still worried about gold inflation in general; expanding the stash will keep gold levels in check for a finite time span only, and if D2 is any indication, D3 will be being played for a long time.

I loved d2 and had several high lvl hardcore chars. After getting into the beta a couple months back I have been much less excited about the game. Maybe I have grown out of the constant clicking, lord knows I havnt with sc2 yet.

Should be interesting - Since prices are going to be transparent, item for item trading should be straight forward. I'll be interested in price discovery as new character builds are optimized for farming (like in D2, when Bot Hammerdins ruled).

Of course, the market will crash every time Blizzard adds new features/items/nerfs.

"I'll be watching it, but I won't be working the market unless I can see a definite upside to it - and I'm not expecting the RMAH to be useful for anyone but the no-lifers who put in 12+ hours per day. "

you don't see an upside in selling a random item that fell while you were having fun playing, that happens to be 1 in a 50,000 drop, for whatever it might fetch, 5, 10,100 dollars? Also, how is that only for no-lifers if it randomly drops the while your playing? you can play 12 hours a day and it might drop or 1 hour a week and it might drop.

I can't wait to attempt to sell something for $250. O_O Surely there is some dumbass out there that will buy it ^_^

Enjoy your $212.50.

You mean $180.63 once you move it to PayPal.

Frankly I'm more excited about putting an item up on the in-game auction house and demanding 100 BILLION DOLLARS^h^h^h^h GOLD PIECES, pinky and all. Actually I'm wondering who is going to come up with that kind of in-game loot; based on my extensive experience playing the open beta for a couple hours, I estimate it would take 40 million hours of play time to get to the magic 100 billion auction max.

"I'll be watching it, but I won't be working the market unless I can see a definite upside to it - and I'm not expecting the RMAH to be useful for anyone but the no-lifers who put in 12+ hours per day. "

you don't see an upside in selling a random item that fell while you were having fun playing, that happens to be 1 in a 50,000 drop, for whatever it might fetch, 5, 10,100 dollars? Also, how is that only for no-lifers if it randomly drops the while your playing? you can play 12 hours a day and it might drop or 1 hour a week and it might drop.

If Person A is putting in 12 hours a day, while person B (who has a full-time job or school) only puts in 4 hours a day, Person A will get to the point where he even has a chance to find the super-rare, desirable and valuable items three times faster, and will therefore spend a great deal of time "rolling the dice" while Person B is still leveling up. Further, once they're both up to the top tier, Person A will have at least three times as much chances to find any given item.

And the 24-hour gold-farming teams will have twice the advantage of Person B. By the time A and B get there, the market will already be flooded by the gold-farmers.

I sold a nice stat pike in Diablo 2 on eBay for over $200 in November of 2000. There was a bug preventing them from dropping. A patch was released that allowed them to drop right around Thanksgiving when I had days off from work. I farmed for the pikes and found a couple. I had a couple level 30 alts that I was saving for imbuing an item. I imbued the pikes and one came out real nice. Posted on eBay and sold within a few hours.

Shortly after that I stopped playing Diablo 2. I felt that I had finished the game since it paid for itself.

So does this somehow prevent people from arranging their own deals elsewhere and just giving the item after payment clears, or even players who act as an escrow service for such an arrangement, or am I missing something?

At first I was pretty against this, I would never part with money to get an advantage playing a video game. If the game requires buying stuff from no-life farmers to enjoy I will not play long. But, what If I can sell any drops I get to folks who do not share my aversion. If slashing demons in D3 can pay for my WoW account, I will be really happy. If not, I will probably still have fun slashing demons.

The plus side of all this is that I am getting D3 for free via WoW annual pass (I wasn't canceling anyway) so I don't have a huge skin in this game.

So does this somehow prevent people from arranging their own deals elsewhere and just giving the item after payment clears, or even players who act as an escrow service for such an arrangement, or am I missing something?

I believe that that has been against the Terms of Service of every persistent online game I've ever played, and you can damn well bet it'll be against the ToS of this one, too. That means they can ban you for doing it. The only questions, really are how hard will they pursue the sellers (probably a fair bit) and buyers (probably not much), and will people be willing to risk a con artist of some sort when they can go through the easy and official channels (no, most people probably will not risk it at all).

This is such BS. I have played every diablo since the original release ~17 years ago and been a WoW subscriber from the beginning. I was not even planning on using this feature. But this is total BS. I understand a 15% fee. But another 15% on top of that? And then allowing paypal to tack on another 15% or more.

I can't wait to attempt to sell something for $250. O_O Surely there is some dumbass out there that will buy it ^_^

Enjoy your $212.50.

It would likely be a unique armor or the like, so it would be $249.

$249 for the original transfer. But then as soon as you try to move it to real money via PayPal.... you can lop off 15%. Read it again.

Of course.....

ALL OF THIS.... is under the assumption that we're not going to set up a "black market" for D3.Honestly, how long do you think it'll take before someone will set up their own website, enable the "sale" of items, minus the 15% fee..... and then do transfers of items at $1 in the in-game system?

Basically.... I sell my item to you for $100 through a third-party website.Third party website buys the item from me in the Blizzard AH for $1. Third party website sells the item to you for $1 in game. Third party website charges $1. Blizzard gets $2 from the two transactions.

In the end:- You get your item. - I get my $100, minus $1 for my fee to Blizzard for the unique item fee, and minus $1 for the third-party website.

I don't pay Blizzard 15% for them to give me the money. You win because I'm not going to increase my price to compensate for Blizzard's "fee", I win because I lose less in transaction "fees". Either way, there are ways around this for the truly entrepreneurial.

I can't wait to attempt to sell something for $250. O_O Surely there is some dumbass out there that will buy it ^_^

Enjoy your $212.50.

And, your point? The fact that you can actually make money just playing a game is a novel concept unto itself. When was the last time you got paid for a hobby you really liked being involved in? Most hobbies cost money, not make money.

This is actually pretty cool. I wasn't even considering the actual money part before, and still may not, but not at least I could potentially use free money for Blizz swag or my lapsed WoW account (that would make them happy at least).

I'll still play the crap out of the game when I can and have a blast doing it.

ok great, the more you play the better the chances of something wonderful dropping, as if i didn't understand that. So again. how is the RMAH not useful for someone that doesn't play much? because a gold farmer will have more use for it ? that somehow makes it useless for someone not playing a lot? you can play very little and still chance upon something awesome. and with the RMAH you can sell it for real money, legally. That, to me , sounds useful.

I'm actually looking forward to this. Blizzard makes money -- so effin what? The main thing that matters to me, the player, is that I can trade items conveniently with the click of a button, as opposed to going through shady third-parties.

I like how they implemented the fees. Basically for high value transactions, they only get 1$ even if some items will probably sell for hundreds of bucks. If they would've been greedy, they could have easily added a % to this too and actually earn a lot more money. Of course, if you sell something for a large sum, you'll probably want to cash out, at which point you'll run into the % fee, so I guess they do have all their bases covered hehe.

And all in all, I see RMAH as a win-win for everyone and it's quite ridiculous that some people refuse to buy the game because of it. It's a system that requires 0 initial investment from your part (if you so chose) and it's also completely optional. It can actually give you money, just for playing the game.. Not to mention that it fits perfectly with the game's mechanics, proof to this being the self-spawning huge item market around D2.

You can not use your Battle.net Balance for recurring subscriptions. i.e. World of Warcraft.

You can not cash out your Battle.net Balance to paypal or any other service. At the time of auction posting, you pick the destination for your proceeds: Battle.net Balance or Paypal (US) plus applicable fee.

After my experience with the WoW auction house, gold-sellers, spam, hacks, and all the other fun things grey marketing brings, I don't mind this much at all - assuming it works.

The hacks shall be amazing. There is real instant money now available to hackers. This is WAY better than trying to SPAM trade chat to sell gold.

Leucifer wrote:

Basically.... I sell my item to you for $100 through a third-party website.Third party website buys the item from me in the Blizzard AH for $1. Third party website sells the item to you for $1 in game. Third party website charges $1. Blizzard gets $2 from the two transactions.

In the end:- You get your item. - I get my $100, minus $1 for my fee to Blizzard for the unique item fee, and minus $1 for the third-party website.

Actually I get your item because software that perpetually scans and buys profitable items, is faster that you.

After my experience with the WoW auction house, gold-sellers, spam, hacks, and all the other fun things grey marketing brings, I don't mind this much at all - assuming it works.

The hacks shall be amazing. There is real instant money now available to hackers. This is WAY better than trying to SPAM trade chat to sell gold.

Leucifer wrote:

Basically.... I sell my item to you for $100 through a third-party website.Third party website buys the item from me in the Blizzard AH for $1. Third party website sells the item to you for $1 in game. Third party website charges $1. Blizzard gets $2 from the two transactions.

In the end:- You get your item. - I get my $100, minus $1 for my fee to Blizzard for the unique item fee, and minus $1 for the third-party website.

Actually I get your item because software that perpetually scans and buys profitable items, is faster that you.

You're assuming that D3 will allow mods or hacks that will enable this. I'll be very surprised if Blizzard does.

Basically.... I sell my item to you for $100 through a third-party website.Third party website buys the item from me in the Blizzard AH for $1. Third party website sells the item to you for $1 in game. Third party website charges $1. Blizzard gets $2 from the two transactions.

In the end:- You get your item. - I get my $100, minus $1 for my fee to Blizzard for the unique item fee, and minus $1 for the third-party website.

Actually I get your item because software that perpetually scans and buys profitable items, is faster that you.

You don't have to use the auction house to sell things. The site just walks up to you in the game and offers to sell you the item for $1.

ok great, the more you play the better the chances of something wonderful dropping, as if i didn't understand that. So again. how is the RMAH not useful for someone that doesn't play much? because a gold farmer will have more use for it ? that somehow makes it useless for someone not playing a lot? you can play very little and still chance upon something awesome. and with the RMAH you can sell it for real money, legally. That, to me , sounds useful.

logic , dude, its clearly not your friend.

Because those other players who are playing 2x, 3x, or more often will flood the market far before you can even get your item to market, effectively destroying the "supply" of the supply and demand equation. You'll get pennies for something you find, compared to someone who finds it in the first rush.

Let's see, I can get 85% of what amount to free money from playing an excellent game (which i get for free because I signed up to plawy World for Warcraft for a year), or I can spend hundreds of hours sweating over an iOS app, spend months waiting for Apple to approve it and put it in their app store, and then get 70% of sales, less any claw-back that Apple decides to take when users claim they don't want the app after all.

Well, gee, I guess I'll waste half a year making an iOS app to protest Blizzard charging me for the free money! Duh!

I'm interested in this more as a buyer than a seller. Sure I might happen to find something worthwhile to sell, whatever.

But I'm damn near 30, I have a full time job, girlfriend and myriad other obligations. I don't have time to farm, or grind away for full gear. I'll gladly pay someone who has the time a few bucks for an item that would take me 5,10, 15 or whatever hours to get. My time is worth more.

I can't wait to attempt to sell something for $250. O_O Surely there is some dumbass out there that will buy it ^_^

Enjoy your $212.50.

It would likely be a unique armor or the like, so it would be $249.

$249 for the original transfer. But then as soon as you try to move it to real money via PayPal.... you can lop off 15%. Read it again.

Of course.....

ALL OF THIS.... is under the assumption that we're not going to set up a "black market" for D3.Honestly, how long do you think it'll take before someone will set up their own website, enable the "sale" of items, minus the 15% fee..... and then do transfers of items at $1 in the in-game system?

Basically.... I sell my item to you for $100 through a third-party website.Third party website buys the item from me in the Blizzard AH for $1. Third party website sells the item to you for $1 in game. Third party website charges $1. Blizzard gets $2 from the two transactions.

In the end:- You get your item. - I get my $100, minus $1 for my fee to Blizzard for the unique item fee, and minus $1 for the third-party website.

I don't pay Blizzard 15% for them to give me the money. You win because I'm not going to increase my price to compensate for Blizzard's "fee", I win because I lose less in transaction "fees". Either way, there are ways around this for the truly entrepreneurial.

Why would any buyers use your inconvenient system? If they're paying directly through Blizzard, they don't pay less to use your system than they would with the legitimate service, so there's no incentive there.

1) Reliability. We know that what we buy from Blizzard will come as advertised. Every sale will have the good delivered and will have the seller compensated. We don't know that about your service.

2) Legitimacy. Blizzard is making a profit from their venture, so they will take all available steps to secure it. That means if they find your little service (and they will) they will likely take steps to protect their offering. Since they're the grand arbiters, the judge, jury and executioners of the game, they will gladly shut down all accounts affiliated with your group if they can. That's a huge risk that buyers and sellers will weigh into their decision to use the service.

Furthermore, sellers will likely see a better turnaround (and greater market prices) on the legitimate market. They don't have incentive to use your service, except for evading the 10 auction maximum. You'd have to compensate for the value here.

Kyle Orland / Kyle is the Senior Gaming Editor at Ars Technica, specializing in video game hardware and software. He has journalism and computer science degrees from University of Maryland. He is based in the Washington, DC area.